For all of the talk in Silicon Valley about how screwed Apple is in the AI race, the iPhone maker got a glowing endorsement of its staying power this past week from an unlikely source: Elon Musk.
The billionaire’s artificial-intelligence company and his social-media platform sued the iPhone maker, claiming it was violating antitrust laws by giving preferential treatment to its own AI partner (and Musk enemy), OpenAI and ChatGPT.
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Amazon’s Project Kuiper, in the race to offer satellite internet service in India, is aiming for a launch next year, though it trails rivals Starlink, OneWeb and Jio Satellite, two people aware of the matter said.
The delay in India foray is because the Amazon arm is still to have a sufficient satellite constellation to launch the services commercially and secure necessary licence and approval in the country, they said, requesting not to be identified. The company is yet to get its network and ground system designs to comply with a set of security conditions laid out by the Indian government.
The company continues to be in discussion with the government on compliance and is expected to complete the formalities by this year-end, said the first of the two persons cited earlier. This person added that like peers, Kuiper also has requested the government to allow serving other geographies with satellite systems or gateways installed in India.
Queries emailed to Kuiper did not elicit any response till press time.
Currently, the government has given a go-ahead to three operators – OneWeb, Jio-SES joint venture, and Elon Musk’s Starlink - to launch the satellite communication services in the country. However, the consumers will only be able to get the satellite internet services after the government allots the spectrum and finalises the fee which these companies will pay the government.
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According to KPMG, India's satellite communication sector is expected to reach $20 billion by 2028.
In May, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) recommended to the department of telecommunications (DoT) that satellite companies must pay 4% of their adjusted gross revenue (AGR) as spectrum charges to the government. In addition, Trai also introduced an additional annual charge of ？500 per subscriber for fixed satellite services providers in urban areas.
“The opportunity in the market is much larger than what one player can serve, and Kuiper is not viewing the project from the perspective of being the first or second to enter," the second person who is close to the company said, adding that Kuiper is progressing based on its own benchmarks and not benchmarking itself with others.
Compliance and licensing
At this stage, the company continues to engage with the government on certain compliance requirements such as local storage of data in view of India's sensitivity to national security.
In October 2023, Kuiper submitted its application to get the global mobile personal communication by satellite (GMPCS) licence, required to launch such services in the country. The company has also submitted its application with the Centre’s nodal agency, Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), to get approval on its satellite constellation.
Currently, Kuiper has over 100 satellites in orbit. The company, which had committed to invest over $10 billion in the venture, plans to launch 3,200 satellites to form a constellation for satellite internet connectivity. By the end of the year, Kuiper expects to have sufficient satellites to start commercial service in certain countries, the second person said.
In comparison, Starlink has over 6,700 satellites globally, whereas OneWeb has 648 satellites, according to data from their websites.
Local operations
Kuiper, however, has built a small team in the country so far to better understand local market needs and tap enterprise customers. The current team is focusing on business development and regulatory work, the second person said. In August, the company listed two positions for hiring in India - Regulatory lead for Middle East and India, and technology business developer.
“The Regulatory Communications Lead - for the Middle East and India will be the external point of contact for Project Kuiper’s service compliance obligation deliverables in front of Middle East and Indian telecommunications regulators," the company said in the job description on its website.
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The technology business developer for Kuiper Ground Infrastructure Services (GIS) will lead land acquisition and entitlement efforts for ground infrastructure locations in India and Southeast Asia for the company.
“Although Kuiper is behind the other satellite internet services providers, it could leverage the enterprise client base of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to cover B2B customers and Amazon.com e-commerce platform to tap retail consumers and grab the market share," a consultant to the satellite companies said on the condition of anonymity.
Global contracts, regional plans
Globally, Kuiper has started signing early customer contracts, including deals with American media company Vrio Corp’s DIRECTV to provide satellite internet services in South America. The company has also signed a deal with Australian government-owned NBN to provide satellite internet services.
Even as India continues to work on the contours of satellite internet rules, the companies including Kuiper, OneWeb and others have also been urging the government to serve other locations as well from the gateways in the country.
“We have been requesting the government to allow the gateways in India to serve neighbouring countries, for example Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka. The government has been kind enough to consider that and we are hoping that a policy announcement will also follow," said Rahul Vatts, chief regulatory officer at Bharti Airtel and director at OneWeb India, at an industry event in New Delhi on 17 July.
“This initiative (allowing Indian gateways to serve other geographies) is not solely aimed at reducing capital expenditure (capex) but is also seen as a way to provide viable service to smaller neighboring countries where it might not be cost-effective to establish ground infrastructure in each location," the second person cited earlier said.
This person added that satcom companies could also look at showing the government that they can achieve data isolation, ensuring that Indian traffic stays within India and traffic from other countries remains within their respective nations.
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“They are actively looking to explain to the government that even if they are allowed to serve other geographies, their network is secure and will prevent data from leaking outside the country," this person added.
However, in an interaction with Mint on 25 August, minister of state for communications Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani said, “whatever (licence) we have given applies only to India. We will not be allowing anything for outside the country."
Security and compliance requirements
On 5 May, DoT issued guidelines to tighten security as satellite communication companies here move closer to starting satellite internet services in the country.
Companies seeking a GMPCS licence in India would require security clearance for specific gateway or hub locations in the country, per the department of telecommunications’ guidelines.
Among the 29 requirements, the government has also mandated data localisation, lawful interception, and local manufacturing requirements for satcom companies.
A key challenge with compliance is the mandate to set up network control and monitoring centres within India, giving India control over satellite telemetry–on-ground management and monitoring of satellites based on transmitted data, one of the officials said.
Indian authorities require that telemetry and control of satellites serving Indian users be done within the country to ensure national security and data sovereignty.
Satellite internet services providers will have to submit a yearly plan to the government showing how they will gradually increase local manufacturing of ground segments of their satellite network in the country. The government has asked companies looking to provide satellite internet services in the country to target at least 20% indigenisation of the ground segment of their satellite network within five years of beginning commercial operations in the country.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) outsmarting humans anytime soon are overblown, leading mathematicians have assured. AI is nowhere close to acquiring critical thinking, or reaching scientific breakthrough that humans are capable of, they said.
While they admit that AI is a powerful technology that will have a profound impact on society and economy, they emphasise that children should be encouraged to enjoy mathematics—'Math for Math's sake'—to help develop creativity and problem-solving skills.
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"...that deep kind of critical thinking, analytic thinking, that keeps us producing new knowledge, that AI is not really doing yet, and whether it will be able to or not, that's sort of still an open question," Manjul Bhargava, professor of mathematics at Princeton University, who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for his work on geometry of numbers, told Mint. "It will take years for it to do the kind of critical thinking, analytical thinking, new knowledge creation, kind of creativity that's required to make scientific and mathematical breakthroughs. It's not really close yet".
The prestigious Fields Medal honour, named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, is considered as the Nobel prize of mathematics.
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His comments come at a time when companies across the world are investing in AI-related infrastructure, and upskilling programmes just when there is a looming fear that AI will replace human jobs. In fact, Microsoft, IBM , Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Amazon and Meta are some of the firms that have retrenched employees as AI gets deployed across hierarchies.
But the work that AI can do today is still relegated to the content that is fed into it. Bhargava pointed out that in the next two-three years, AI will solve problems because it would have read all undergraduate math and science books and through large language learning models "mimic the kinds of solutions that are in all these books".
He rejected the notion that mathematicians are worried about AI.
"No, there's not so much fear. There's more excitement. Right now, there's a lot of humour and laughter at the kinds of answers that AI gives to slightly more complex math questions… But it's not necessarily going to be coming up with anything that humans don't know. So, in that sense, it's not really doing critical thinking, it is doing pattern matching".
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V. Kumar Murty, who teaches mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada, told Mint that the job losses seen at companies are temporary. “What we should really be thinking of is, okay, if certain jobs disappear, what new job is it going to enable, that doesn't exist now? What new opportunities is it going to create for me that don't exist now?"
Murty, who held the post of director of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Canada, highlighted the need to encourage math learning for the sake of the subject and to move away from rote learning or focus only on entrance exams for an engineering seat.
In India, more than 1.3 million students appeared for this year’s engineering entrance test in a bid to secure admission to one of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or other government-funded engineering institutions.
For many students, the road to a reputable engineering college goes through coaching hubs like Kota and Sikar (Rajasthan). The professors want that outlook to change.
“The engine of innovation is mathematics. What is Google? It's linear algebra. The robotic vacuum cleaner is computational geometry. Satellite transmission is polynomial over finite fields. Any piece of technology that is in common use today has, at its root, mathematics… If you want to have that culture of strong research, strong innovation, you need to let the people who do math for math's sake have opportunity as well," Murty.
Bhargava is more optimistic that classroom teaching is going beyond chalkboards and there is importance given to interdisciplinary teaching where subjects are not offered depending on grades with the belief that one is superior to the other.
Coincidentally, Bhargava and Murty are also involved in the Lodha Mathematical Sciences Institute, a newly-launched privately-funded math research institute in Mumbai. While Bhargava is the inaugural thematic programme head, Murty is the director at the institute.
Artificial intelligence can do a lot these days—and will be able to do a lot more in the future. But killing a $1.2 trillion industry will be a stretch.
That is how much the world’s businesses are expected to spend on enterprise software this year, according to projections from market research firm Gartner. It is a big number, and nearly 11% higher than the $1.1 trillion that was spent last year.
Businesses spend more on software than just about any other technology-related category. But the age of AI has made that budget line look increasingly under threat. Among the early promises of tools such as ChatGPT was that it could allow novices to create software by simply telling the LLM what they want in natural language. Such “vibe coding" could theoretically render premade software obsolete. In a live demo of its new GPT-5 model earlier this month, OpenAI employees created an app for teaching French to English speakers in a few minutes, all on stage.
“We think this idea of software on demand is going to be one of the defining characteristics of the GPT-5 era," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at the event. He is actually a bit late to the party; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proclaimed in 2017 that “AI is going to eat software."
The prospect of an existential threat has cast a darker shadow on an industry that was already under a cloud. Global economic uncertainty caused by trade wars, real wars and the prospect of inflation has created a “business pause on net-new spending" on corporate IT needs, Gartner’s analysts wrote in a report last month. Booming investments in AI infrastructure are also pressuring other areas of the corporate tech budget line.
Wall Street is getting worried. Analysts are asking executives about topics such as “AI disruption" with increasing frequency, according to an analysis of earnings calls and other events by AlphaSense. Software stocks have also been among the weakest categories in tech of late. The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index has slumped nearly 6% over the past month and is the only major tech subcategory to be in the red for the year to date, according to FactSet.
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Software’s Death by AI Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
AI tools are certainly changing the game for software development. JPMorgan Chase Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum told analysts at a meeting in May that he had been indulging in vibe coding, describing it as “pretty amazing." But highly complex software applications running mission-critical tasks won’t be simple to replace. Especially those running on data related to sensitive—and often regulated—areas such as human resources and finance.
“More than 65% of the Fortune 500 use us, and not one of them is going to say ‘Come in here AI startup and run my back office and financial controls,’" Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said in an interview.
Companies such as Workday and Salesforce, which disrupted the more traditional on-premise software industry not too long ago, are working furiously to adopt AI themselves within their own products. Agents—AI chatbots that are enabled to take certain actions on behalf of people—are a big part of this effort. Nearly every software-as-a-service company is now selling agent tools to their customers, though RBC analysts argued in a report this week that the real opportunity will come from “multi-agentic" systems that can operate across different software applications, which no one has really cracked yet.
“For example, a sales leader should be able to use natural language to onboard a new salesperson," RBC’s report read, executing across HR identity systems, expense cards, training programs and so on.
Vibe coding is unlikely to pull that off. In his own report earlier this month, longtime software analyst Brent Thill of Jefferies cited the “meaningful complexity" across current business software workflows that AI cannot yet replace. “In our view, the intricacies of enterprise architecture make full AI disintermediation of software unlikely," he wrote.
Stumbles by AI companies will help make that case. OpenAI faced a flood of criticism following the GPT-5 launch, with users complaining about inaccurate answers from a chatbot that Altman touted as the equivalent of “having a team of Ph.D. level experts in your pocket." Meta Platforms has also struggled with taking its Llama 4 model to the next level.
AI chatbots may have quickly disrupted high-school term papers. Replacing billion-dollar software systems won’t come so easily.
Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com
After his ouster from Twitter, now 'X', Parag Agrawal has launched a new company, Parallel Web Systems, that is attempting to create a "web for machines". He is betting on a web that will be dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), not humans.
Agrawal is building infrastructure and tools optimized for AI agents to access, verify, and organise web data. Simply put, he wants to change how AI surfs the internet by creating a platform that is built for AI, works in real time, can be trusted, and scales easily. But is the idea new? What does it entail? And will it truly transform the web or remain a private ecosystem? Mint explains
What is Parag Agrawal's story so far?
India-born Parag Agrawal began his career in 2006 as a researcher at Microsoft before moving briefly to Yahoo and later returning to Microsoft. In 2009, he joined AT&T’s research division, but it was at Twitter, which he entered in 2011 as a distinguished software engineer, that his career took off.
After six years, he rose to chief technology officer and, in 2021, was named CEO. His tenure was cut short when Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, rebranded it as X, and ousted thousands of employees, including Agrawal and three other top executives. The employees collectively sued Musk for $500 million in severance pay, which the latter has partly tentatively settled for now. However, Agrawal and the other three senior executives continue to pursue their own claims in court.
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Why is he in the news again?
The IIT Bombay graduate recently announced the launch of his new company's "Deep Research API (application programming interface)", which he claimed is "...the first to outperform both humans and all leading models including GPT-5 on two of the hardest benchmarks (the DeepResearch Bench and Browse Comp benchmarks show how well AI can dig up hard-to-find information and produce detailed reports)".
In operations since last October, Parallel Web Systems already powers "millions of research tasks every day". According to Agrawal's LinkedIn post last week, "...some of the fastest growing AI companies use Parallel to bring web intelligence directly into their platform and agents. A public company automates traditionally human workflows, exceeding human-level accuracy with Parallel. Coding agents rely on our search to find docs and debug issues…"
What does it mean for users and enterprises?
Unlike Google or Perplexity, which serve people with answers or links, Parallel is designed for machines. Its Deep Research API enables AI agents to move beyond surface-level searches, using multiple research engines to deliver anything from quick responses to complex, time-intensive insights.
Each result comes with attribution, confidence scores, and structured outputs, making the data both verifiable and machine-ready. For enterprises, this means plugging the API into their own AI systems to power tasks like market analysis, due diligence, customer research, or competitive intelligence. By prioritising traceability and reliability, Parallel is attempting to tackle the problem of AI hallucinations. That makes it especially valuable for sectors such as finance, law, and healthcare, where accuracy and trust matter most.
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But how unique is Agrawal's idea?
Agrawal is right that today’s web still serves humans: we click links, juggle tabs, compare prices, and judge credibility. AI systems attempt the same with unstructured data, paywalls, and noise, limiting them to simple queries. His vision, though, isn’t entirely new.
The programmatic web has long imagined reshaping the internet so machines can interact with it directly. The agentic web goes further, envisioning AI agents that don’t just fetch facts but act on them— booking flights, restocking groceries, or running analysis. But unlike Web3, which focused on decentralised ownership but never scaled, Parallel is a web built for AI as its primary user. With APIs that promise clean, verifiable, real-time data, Agrawal is creating the first serious infrastructure for this shift in the hope that enterprises will pay for it.
What about standards and protocols?
Every major shift in the web’s history has relied on standards and protocols established by bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—from hypertext mark up language (HTML) to the frameworks that make today’s web interoperable, allowing programs to communicate with each other.
In the early days of search engines, for instance, companies each used their own indexing methods until standards around metadata and site maps helped unify the ecosystem. Likewise, the rise of mobile apps forced developers and device makers to agree on protocols that allowed apps to work across platforms.
The programmatic web, though, is a complex marketplace dominated by opaque systems and proprietary tech. It still runs on the foundation set by bodies like the W3C and IETF, but remains a patchwork of open ideals and closed commercial interests even as standards groups are trying to rein it back.
Agrawal's vision of a programmatic, machine-first web, too, would need common formats for attribution, verification, and structured outputs to enable AI agents to reliably share and interpret information across platforms, failing which his project risks becoming another siloed ecosystem as opposed to the transformative web infrastructure he envisions.
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What about the AI bot problem?
Automated bots already make up close to half of all internet traffic, performing tasks such as price comparisons and content scraping, but also spamming or gaming systems for ads and clicks. Further, AI-driven bots can mimic human behaviour, learn from their environment, and evade detection.
A machine-first web risks amplifying those problems unless it can distinguish between “good" AI agents and malicious bots. Verification and attribution, which Parallel is building into its system, may help by giving enterprises a way to trust certain sources while filtering out noise. But how do you stop an AI-first internet from becoming overrun by low-quality or adversarial traffic? Search engines like Google already fight constant battles with SEO spam; a programmatic web like Agrawal's Parallel could magnify that challenge many times over.
So, what can we conclude?
For now, the good news is that investors are supporting the idea. To date, Agrawal has secured $30 million in funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and Index Ventures. However, given the bad bot problem and interoperability challenges, Agrawal's AI startup will not only have to build infrastructure for AI research, but also ensure governance and guardrails that prevent the platform from being gamed.
New Delhi: As the first tranche of India’s chip incentives ends, the government plans to expand the scheme to boost indigenous design and bring components and other parts of the supply chain under the India Semiconductor Mission, said the top technology ministry bureaucrat.
“India does not need only chip fabs (fabrication plants) and testing plants, but also equipment suppliers, material suppliers, gases and chemicals are all areas that were not covered under ISM’s (the semiconductor mission’s) first plan, and need attention," said S. Krishnan, secretary in the ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity).
“These areas were previously covered under the Scheme for Promotion of Manufacturing of Electronic Components and Semiconductors (Specs), which completed its tenure," he toldMintin an interview. “Now, a part of this has been replaced by the electronics component manufacturing scheme (ECMS), which very specifically focuses on electronics components. The semiconductor part of it is what will now come under ISM 2.0."
The plan comes ahead of the fourth Centre-backed Semicon India, an annual semiconductor event at which India will likely seek more partnerships with global chip supply-chain vendors. Krishnan said that “since the goal is tofocus on building a resilient ecosystem, it is important to encourage the overall supply chain".
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Krishnan, who is in charge of the semiconductor incentives programme, said the Centre was looking at a way to focus on areas that were not in the spotlight through ISM’s first tenure. ISM was approved by the Centre in December 2021, with a $10 billion outlay over six years. Krishnan said at a press conference late on Friday that the scheme has utilized nearly all of its budget, with just over 2% remaining.
Out of the $10 billion (around ？76,000 crore when the scheme was approved), ？65,000 crore was allocated for semiconductor fabrication. Of this, the government has so far committed ？63,000 crore towards 10 projects and is looking to fund a few small projects with the remaining funds, Krishnan said. The government kept ？10,000 crore for the revamp of Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL), Mohali and ？1,000 crore for the design-linked incentives, approving 23 projects under the scheme so far.
Krishnan said that as part of the revamp under the design-linked incentive scheme, the government is also examining how quickly the funds can be made available for the companies.
The first chip will be rolled out this year, Krishnan said.
For funds under India Semiconductor Mission 2.0, the government is in talks with the finance ministry, Krishnan said.
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“With ISM 2.0, we’re also looking to revamp our design-linked incentive scheme, for which we’re looking at a number of suggestions," said Krishnan. “There’s been a request from the industry to give it wider coverage—to make more risk capital available. These issues are being addressed as part of our revamp of the scheme."
Ashok Chandak, president of India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (Iesa), said the core ask of the semiconductor industry is to incentivize the entire ecosystem, so that “we can support the full production locally".
“The need of the hour is operational efficiencies, and at the upcoming Semicon 2025, we will have representation of all parts of the global semiconductor supply chain," he said. “Pushing for developing strategic parts of the chip ecosystem will now be crucial to take our industry to the next step."
Krishnan, a 1989 batch officer of the Indian Administrative Services, took charge at Meity in September 2023. He also oversees India’s top initiatives for electronics and technology—including the $2.7 billion ECMS, a $1.2-billion AI Mission, and ongoing initiatives such as production-linked incentives (PLIs) for mobiles.
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Krishnan, who has served as the chief executive of Tamil Nadu Infrastructure Development Board, was responsible for developing the southern state into an early hub for electronics manufacturing and drawing investment from Taiwan’s Foxconn, among others.
Amid preparations for the next tranche of semiconductor investments, conversations around the Centre’s blanket ban on online money games persisted through the week. On Friday, Rashtrapati Bhavan confirmed that the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025 had received the President’s assent.
Krishnan told Mint that the law does not target any individual entity. “We’re saying that categories that are permitted will be promoted—only one of the three categories is problematic, and needs to be stopped. There will be a requirement for a small set of rules to enforce the oversight committee and other such details, which will also be done at the earliest."
The official also added that the long-pending Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2025 is likely to be enforced “much earlier than the end of this calendar year".
“There aren’t many changes, and alterations are limited and not very major. We are consulting other ministries, and should be able to put it out quickly," he said. “A lot of energy went into clarifying the rules, which sorted out many issues associated with the DPDP Act. Beyond that, there were some genuine issues where some minor changes, some language tweaks and some clarity were required. All of that has been completed now."
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